Ruby, Community, Ramblings

This is post #1 of a multi-post series about the interface design and construction of a sample application. I’ll be demonstrating some of my thought processes, decisions I make, and problems I may encounter. We’ll be focusing both on the user interface design and the interesting parts of actually building the app to implement the design. Come along for the ride.

Mission statement

First step is obviously knowing what you want to build. It’s always a good idea to have a “Mission Statement” for any project– a quick, 3 sentence max (1 or 2 would be better) statement that is the root of what your application does.

I’ve been getting in to homebrewing recently, so let’s go there for some useless but still fun material. I’ve got plenty of software to help me formulate exactly what is going in to each brew, but I’ve found it hard to keep track/remember of when different stages of the beer are nearing completion (or, overdue, maybe). Fermentations typically go anywhere from 1-4 weeks, and then there’s various additional stages you may want to do afterwards (secondary fermentation, dry hopping, bulk aging, to name a few). There’s typically a range for the end of the stage– you need to check in on your beer during that time even more to see when it’s ready for the next step.

So, here we go, mission statement time:

Provide a concise summary of the different brews a brewer currently has going. The brewer should be able to determine at a glance what needs watching (might be done), what’s probably overdue, and what can be safely ignored for the time being.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt

You’ve been warned.

The Plan

I’ve resisted blogging recently because of an inordinate number of started-in-good-intentions-then-abandoned-after-a-month sort of efforts. Until I could convince myself I wasn’t going to repeat said mistakes, it was better to stay silent.

“This time will be different”– why? Well, I’ve actually gotten a plan for a series of articles that should hold my interest sufficiently to at least build some sort of critical mass of posts. That’s the plan anyhow. Otherwise I guess I’ll have removed all doubt.